Mouth to Mouth
A disillusioned young girl looking to carve her own path in life and live on her own terms hits the road with a volatile collection of radical revolutionaries in director Alison Murray's uncompromising coming-of-age road film. Sherry (Ellen Page) is a teenage contradiction of sorts; she wants to be accepted but she doesn't want to sacrifice her fierce individualism. When Sherry meets up with SPARKS (Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge) and decides to join the curious group of counter-culture activists in their trek across Europe, it appears as if the idealistic young traveler has finally found a family who will accept her for who she really is. When the SPARKS group arrives in an abandoned Portuguese vineyard to set up their own private Shangri-la, though, their ultimate goal grows increasingly ominous as the heated rhetoric of group leader Harry begins to take a dangerous slant. When a pair of deaths prompt the more weak-minded members of the group to pledge unwavering support, skeptical Sherry and questioning fellow SPARKS member Mad Ax begin to see the group for what it really is -- a cleverly disguised recruitment tool designed specifically to promote dangerous leader Harry's warped ideology. more..
Director: Alison Murray
Starring: Ellen Page, Natasha Wightman, Eric Thal, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Jim Sturgess
Writer-director Alison Murray picks at a hard, true hurt in this zombie melodrama of defloration, but nothing beyond that hurt really comes into focus.
Canadian-born choreographer Alison Murray draws on her own experiences as a 15-year-old runaway living in squats and on the streets, in her feature-filmmaking debut, which is a clear-eyed look at the pleasures and price of abandoning conventional mores for experimental lifestyles.
Emerges an uneven, occasionally vivid, ultimately unsatisfactory treatment of themes that should've packed more punch.
Filmmaker Alison Murray drew on her own experiences, but Mouth to Mouth would have benefited from more focus and fewer dance sequences.
Murray's story has the no-holds-barred look and feel of a '70s movie, but her digressions into modern dance are a tad unwelcome.
Alison Murray
Brooklyn International Film Festival (2005)
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